Chaire de recherche du Canada en ÉPI

Équipe

Krystel Wanneau is a PhD candidate in Political sciences at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Her research focuses on the influence of knowledge circulation over international environmental policy-framing. She particularly studies scientific policy-making in international organizations (IO) taking evidence from IO programs that create a science-policy interface. She looks at how IOs shape scientific knowledge to build their expertise using the concept of epistemic community. Her field of study includes global environmental changes and environmental security issues. She holds a teaching assistant position at the Faculty of Political Sciences and is affiliated to the research centre REPI/ULB (Research and teaching in international politics). She regularly collaborates with the Environment and Society Chair of the CEDD/ULB (Sustainable development study centre).

Teaching

Contemporary Political Issues - Theme of the seminar: International environmental issues since the mid-20th century (ULB Bachelor) - Teaching language: French

History of political thought - Theme of the seminar: International relations in political thought since the emergence of the modern State (ULB Bachelor) - Teaching language : French

Current research project

Krystel Wanneau initiated with other researchers a workshop series on environment and security for 2014-15. This collective effort aims to pursue an interdisciplinary dialogue initiated in the 1990s by researchers from environmental and security fields. The research perspectives that emerged over the last two decades have focused on several dimensions of the environment-security nexus. As the field matured, it enriched itself from different environmental conceptions and multiple security approaches. It seeks to enhance transnational research and create an open space to foster dialogue between disciplines relevant to uncover this nexus.

The Workshops on Environment and Security (WES) provide a space for researchers from different academic backgrounds to discuss how environmental and security issues mutually influence each other. This collaborative effort is the product of a renewed partnership between Sciences Po Paris (Sciences Po) and the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) on environment and security, with the additional participation of three partner institutions, the University of Geneva (UniGe), the University of Economics in Bratislava (UEBA) and the Fletcher School of Tufts University. For this first edition, we organize 5 workshops over a year, beginning in late 2014, each partner university hosting one workshop.

http://wes-series.ulb.ac.be/

Articles scientifiques

In the 1990s, a discourse emerged within global environmental change research underlining the need to go beyond previously held boundaries between science and society. While not entirely new, this discourse has however reached the highest levels of scientific cooperation embodied among others in the Future Earth (FE) platform and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Using the concept of (anti)-boundary work developed in Science and Technology Studies (STS), we trace shifts in discourses about the boundaries between social and natural disciplines; between scientists and societal actors; and finally, between the definition of problems and the provision of solutions. We do so analyzing the emergence of global sustainability and solution-oriented science in the discourses of scientific and political actors involved in FE and the IPCC. We conclude with a discussion of challenges connected to the implementation of solution-oriented research and assessment. This article is part of a special issue on solution-oriented GEAs.

Highlights

• Solution-oriented research and assessment are transforming the role of science in society.

• It challenges boundaries between social and natural disciplines; experts and social actors; problems and solutions.

• Illustrations of anti-boundary discourses are given in Future Earth and IPCC.

For a long time forgotten from climate governance, local adaptation efforts have emerged in France in 2010. Territorial actors have a legal obligation to implement Climate-energy territorial Plans (PCET). These PCET have confronted them to complex adaptation challenges including locking effects during their strategic elaboration and implementation. An ontological uncertainty marks this exercise, and therefore pushes actors to reinvent their perception of territory. The study analyses how the territorial architecture, understood as the available institutional competence and knowledge of the territory, structures PCET’s adaptation approaches. It identifies leverages, room for manoeuvre as well as social and institutional barriers. As a conclusion, regularities are observed, in spite of the singularity of each actors’ mobilisation during the PCET: either adaptation is reduced to the legal minimum, or it embarks the actors in a transversal project difficult to achieve. Nonetheless, the process combines expert and non-expert knowledge along with the intention to assess the territory. To some extent, this ambition is more important than the lack of resources affected to PCETs.